Cartier, Francoise et Daniel

Cartier, f&d

Françoise and Daniel Cartier The visual artist couple exhibit as f&d cartier and live in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland. Since 1995, they merged their practices –plastic arts & photography- to move toward new approaches.Examining the indispensable prerequisites for photography - light and photosensitive paper – they mainly opt for “camera-less” combined with “found-objects” concepts. Chromatic evolutional photo paper series, daylight photograms, extreme solarisations, reinterpretation of original albumen glass plate’s are completed.Exemplifying their minimalist tendencies, the duo questions everyday life, intimacy, passing of time, the position and role of the artist & of the Image in today’s society. Present in various foreign and Swiss Museums’ and public collections, they have been awarded prominent distinctions.

““Roses,” a major body of work that this closely-knit husband-and-wife artist team has been building up since 1998. Their efforts have yielded several series of photograms — images cast by the sunlight alone as it touches the light-sensitive paper surrounding the carefully chosen objets trouvés placed upon it by the artists. Here, photography is reduced to its simplest but most immediate expression. Omitting the camera, the Cartiers achieve a quasi “material” likeness of reality, at the very time when the images and world seeking to apprehend it are dematerializing before our very eyes, evanescing into the virtuality of pixels and bytes — be they mega, giga, or otherwise. … In their photograms — each of which, by the way, is a one-off image — Françoise and Daniel Cartier combine an archaic photographic technique with objects that are part and parcel of contemporary life and modern consumer society: lingerie, doll clothes, handkerchiefs and bathing caps on the one hand and, on the other, skeletal doll outlines, X-rays, strands of hair and self-portraits. The objects are almost all bathed in a rose-pink color of varying degrees of transparency, each boasting an aura of its own. While present in the traces, indeed almost tangible marks, they leave on the paper, they are at the same time absent, slowly fading away in the manner of an afterimage behind closed eyelids.”